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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a